Reposted from The Washington Post

In Prince George’s County, where officials on Thursday halted indoor dining and ordered new caps on crowds in retail businesses and casinos, the library system said Friday it too would shut down. The National Museum of the U.S. Army is temporarily closing, while NFL games at FedEx Field will be without spectators the rest of the season.

The greater Washington region added to its growing list of restrictions and closures this week — days that also coincided with the largest number of coronavirus infections since the start of the pandemic. The seven-day average of new cases across Virginia, Maryland and D.C. stood Friday at 6,887, down slightly from Thursday’s record high.

In Prince George’s, library staff members who had been working in buildings to check out books to customers via curbside pickup service will work at home from Dec. 21 to Jan. 12, the library system announced.

“The public health conditions right now require that we adjust operations to keep staff and customers safe during the surge,” the county said in a statement.

Patrons can still check out e-books and audiobooks virtually, but cannot check out or return printed books or other physical materials.

The Prince George’s County library system, like others in the region, has offered curbside pickup but has not allowed patrons into buildings during the pandemic. D.C. is an exception: Many of its library branches have been open for limited book pickups and computer use since the summer, although librarians have expressed concern about their safety.

Infections have risen sharply across the region throughout the fall and as temperatures have turned colder.

As of Friday, the steepest weekly caseload rise was in Virginia, where 60 percent more infections were reported than the week before. The state’s average new daily case rate per 100,000 residents hit an all-time high of 46, with Maryland recording the same rate of spread. The District’s rate per 100,000 residents was 39 on Friday.

Virginia reported 3,395 new daily cases and 35 deaths from the virus Friday. Maryland reported 2,616 cases and 52 deaths, and D.C. reported 259 cases and one death.

The region’s leaders have responded to the surge in infections by introducing new restrictions throughout the week. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced a nighttime curfew Thursday. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) banned high school sports and recreational contact sports Monday.

Some Maryland jurisdictions announced bans on indoor dining and lower caps at retail establishments in a week that included a joint call with leaders of the state’s eight most populous localities.

In Virginia, Army officials announced Friday that a coronavirus outbreak at the National Museum of the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir will force it to temporarily close the facility, starting Monday.

In a statement, the Army said “a small number” of museum employees recently have tested positive. The museum sees as many as 560 visitors daily, officials said.

The museum will remain open Saturday and Sunday, with precautions that include timed entry tickets to reduce capacity.

A museum guard, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his job security, said he is one of four guards who have tested positive since late November. His symptoms, including a fever and chills, have begun to subside.

“I’m in constant contact with the public,” said the guard.

The Washington Football Team also joined the parade of cancellations Friday, announcing that after discussing the safety of allowing fans in the stadium with the Prince George’s County Health Department, the team decided to play its remaining two home games in front of empty seats.

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Reposted from AAM 

With rising sea levels and stronger floods and hurricane seasons, priceless cultural sites and museum collections around the world are increasingly under threat from severe weather events and the impacts of climate change. A recent and seminal report in the journal Nature Communications, for instance, found that thirty-seven out of forty-nine UNESCO World Heritage sites in coastal Mediterranean areas face substantial flood risks. For another perspective, consider Boston, home to numerous waterfront museums, where water levels are predicted to rise more than two feet over the next several decades. Or New York City, where cultural sites are currently at risk from floods and rising sea levels—especially in Lower Manhattan and around all of the island’s edges.

The challenges are formidable and go beyond these examples. With that in mind, the question for institutional leaders and their consultant teams is an existential one: How can we adapt our facilities to meet this challenge?

Museum planners will encounter the threat of severe weather firsthand, as Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in collaboration with our firm Cooper Robertson, did in planning the Whitney Museum of American Art. When Superstorm Sandy hit New York in 2012, the museum was well under construction in the Meatpacking District adjacent to the Hudson River, and although its structure held up well, the storm surge brought over six million gallons of river water into the building’s thirty-foot-deep basement. Our team had to re-evaluate our flood protection plans—and the resulting design offers a useful case study for museum leaders. The lessons applied include how best to assess flood risk, as well as specific design strategies for incorporating barrier systems and rethinking space planning and interior layouts.

Among the most valuable takeaways and solutions from this project are those laid out in this article.

First Things First: Understanding Risk

Any planning and design approach should prioritize capital resources to first address life safety, then protect and preserve collections, and finally maintain building integrity. Accomplishing this, however, depends on a clear understanding and definition of the actual risks facing a given building, which can be difficult to ascertain. Project teams often use flood maps and related projections as the baseline resources to assess the risk of flooding, in terms of sea level rise and severe weather events, but our experience shows that you can’t assume current maps will tell the full story.

Before Hurricane Sandy, the Whitney’s original design elevated the lobby to ten feet, an additional foot above the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s recommendation. This was based on projections for a five-hundred-year storm, but the hurricane made clear it was not enough. Following the storm, FEMA revised its flood zone maps, recommending a 13.5-foot elevation for construction on the Whitney’s site. Seeing this, and sensing the revised elevation could still not be conservative enough, the project team realized it was crucial to work with outside consultants who could help model all possible scenarios. After an international search, the team ultimately selected WTM Engineers from Hamburg, Germany, and their partner, the Franzius Institute for Hydraulic, Waterways, and Coastal Engineering of the Leibniz University in Hanover—two organizations well-versed in protecting urban environments from flooding.

After an extensive study of New York Harbor and its environmental history, the Franzius Institute’s team recommended that the museum building actually be protected up to a 16.5-foot elevation. With this new data in hand, the design team worked with WTM to create modifications for the new facility, both temporary and permanent, that could protect the Whitney’s structure from future storm events. The key lesson here was that the Whitney, like other cultural institutions, would need to thoroughly define the actual risks before specific design proposals could be developed and priced. Only then could the best approach truly be selected.

Ground Control: Design Solutions to Protect the Building Envelope

In the case of a flooding event, the main goal is to preserve the integrity of the museum facility’s ground floor as completely as possible, which ensures that the rest of the building is safeguarded too. Design and facilities teams should examine all possible water infiltration points. Reinforced walls and substantial waterproof membranes are crucial, and the architects for the new Whitney Museum recommend waterproofing at the foundation to seal any concrete penetrations made for electrical conduits, gas service, electrical service, and piping.

Even still, some gaps in the building envelope will be inevitable—for example at loading docks and other large entry points. This is the case at the Whitney, where the loading dock and staff entry doors are located on the west side of the building, closest to the Hudson River, at street level and a vulnerable six-foot elevation. The solution to this problem was inspired by a nautical idea: the design team enlisted Walz and Krenzer, manufacturers of watertight doors for naval vessels, to build floodgates that would prevent water from entering through these locations. These floodgates consist of a ten-inch-thick aluminum plate with a hinge that seals out water by locking into steel plates embedded into reinforced building liner walls. The result is efficient: it only takes two Whitney facilities staff members to close the gates in case of a flood emergency. (Importantly, though, the floodgates are only effective if the rest of the building is sealed; continuity is critical to ensure effective protection.)

But not all flood barriers need to be permanent interventions. Temporary barriers play an important role too, and can be easier to retrofit at existing buildings. For the Whitney, the design team devised a movable protective system that can be easily deployed in anticipation of major flooding. In the hours preceding a storm event, a Whitney staff member will transport temporary barriers—horizontal aluminum “logs”—from a nearby warehouse and fasten them onto vertical aluminum posts bolted into a continuous concrete curb on the building’s plaza. These temporary barriers protect the lobby’s large expanses of glass walls, which play an important role in the institutional mission of openness but leave the building vulnerable to pressurized water.

Design teams should also note that flood preparation requires extensive structural reinforcement to the surrounding site. Working with structural engineers Silman, the Whitney team heavily reinforced the museum plaza’s concrete to accommodate the additional water weight of a storm surge. The plaza’s drainage system was also redesigned by engineers Jaros Baum & Bolles, so that any water which might either leak or splash over the temporary barriers can drain away from the dry, protected area on the building side of the walls.

Inside Choices: New Approaches to Space Planning, Layouts, and Building Systems

Looking beyond the building envelope, a holistic approach to flood protection and mitigation may also require rethinking common layouts and space planning practices, with elevation as a key goal. One of the Whitney building’s most forward-thinking design elements, for instance, is the absence of any permanent galleries or art storage on the lower levels—all art galleries begin on the fifth floor and extend upward. Prioritizing elevation this way, however, poses a challenge for many museums—especially those in historic buildings, where storage areas, gallery space, and the mechanical systems that support them are often located below-grade or within the floodplain, usually in cellars. Where possible and in locations most at risk, museum leaders should consider reconfiguring layouts to raise the majority, or all, of these spaces to a safe elevation. For now, this is an advisable but generally elective step for existing structures. Eventually, however, as climate change impacts continue to grow in seriousness, building codes may compel museums to retrofit their facilities and elevate critical uses above the potential water line.

Even if relocating mechanical equipment to a different space within the museum facility is not feasible in the short or medium term, it’s important to find ways to maintain continuity of service in the event of a superstorm. As a first step, any mechanical equipment within a flood area should be protected with barriers. Design and facilities teams can create curbs around mechanical rooms, or within the room to elevate equipment. Even a slight increase in elevation can make a big difference—not to mention a positive impact—when it comes to obtaining or maintaining flood insurance. Our design team has seen many institutions raise equipment on concrete platforms four to six inches above the floor; at the Whitney, the project team mandated a minimum elevation of fourteen inches for electrical equipment. This figure resulted from precise calculations to account for numerous flood event scenarios, including the failure of various functions. For example, if the water pumps should fail, it was determined that roughly ten inches of water could flood the basement.

Facilities teams should also consider how long their institution’s backup generator can run, and what is included in their emergency power supply network. From both a life safety and collections preservation standpoint, it’s crucial to keep the environmental controls and conditions consistent for as long as possible. The Whitney project team came up with forty-eight hours as a benchmark. For most institutions dependent on public utilities, the implications of a public grid outage can be severe, and it’s especially crucial to have contingencies in place. Although this is less of an issue for academic museums, which can often take advantage of robust campus utilities, auxiliary power is still an important consideration, and any facilities team should have generators and backup systems.

At the Whitney, these considerations inspired an additional change to the original building design and a rethinking of the museum’s emergency energy sources. Instead of the thousand-gallon diesel fuel oil tank originally planned for the museum, the Whitney’s insurance advisors suggested accommodating the largest tank possible. Now, the building has a four-thousand-gallon tank, which provides as much emergency fuel as possible. This allows the building’s systems—particularly the pump system—to run for a far greater duration than originally planned.

As museum leaders—along with their facilities teams, architects, and other consultants—come face-to-face with a future likely to be marked by increased storms and flooding, a smart design approach to resiliency will be essential. By considering these strategies now, it’s possible to stem the tide of rising waters, while also giving staff (and visitors, trustees, and artists) peace of mind that their cultural home will be able to withstand future unprecedented weather events.

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

More than 60 museum experts from five continents came together on 16-18 November to participate in Reframing Museums, a virtual symposium organised by Louvre Abu Dhabi and New York University Abu Dhabi. Speakers included the directors of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, the not-yet-open Lucas Museum in Los Angeles and Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi. The event marked Louvre Abu Dhabi’s third anniversary and NYU Abu Dhabi’s tenth anniversary.

Although the talks were centred around the three broad themes of museum collections, buildings and people, there was undoubtedly one overarching subject of discussion: the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The symposium offered an insight into how museums worldwide are grappling with the immediate financial and social challenges of the pandemic, but also raised questions about their longer-term future.

The mass closure of cultural institutions under coronavirus restrictions presents an opportunity for museums to “reframe themselves”, said Mariët Westermann, the vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi. “How were they missed when they were gone, and what did they learn about their relevance that can help them be vital, vibrant, and meaningful places?”

For those who missed out on the live Zoom event, the organisers have made recordings of all the sessions available on a dedicated Reframing Museums YouTube channel. Here, we break down some of the key takeaways from the talks.

Exhibitions are not dead, but they will be different

Exhibition formats will need to be rethought but seeing shows in the flesh will be more important than ever in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, said a panel of speakers participating in the roundtable discussion The Future of Exhibitions in a Post-Pandemic World.

Chris Dercon, the president of the Grand Palais in Paris, said that the public is tiring of digital content, which proliferated during the first lockdown. “I think we need museums to have physical encounters not just with the works, but also with other visitors.” He also asked: “Do we continue to upload endless digital content without a system of monetisation?”

But social distancing measures have led to the “collapse” of the Grand Palais’s blockbuster exhibition model, Dercon said; for example, a recent show of archaeological treasures from Pompeii could only receive 210 visitors at any one time.  

Hervé Barbaret, the director general of Agence-France Muséums, questioned the relevance of large loan exhibitions. “Can we think about making exhibitions more in relation to permanent collections? Sometimes exhibitions have been criticised because of the blockbuster or entertainment side of them rather how they amplify the richness of the permanent collection,” Barbaret noted.

However, he defended the environmental cost of shipping art around the world for special exhibitions. “Probably it is more eco-friendly to have one work of art travelling to be seen by 10,000 people rather than 10,000 people travelling to see a work of art, that is the point of exhibitions.”  

Collections can be reinterpreted to unleash multiple narratives and shared more locally

The panel discussion From Acquisition to Storytelling: What Does the Future Hold for Museum Collections? focused on how museums can deploy their permanent holdings for more “flexible” storytelling within their walls and to strengthen partnerships at a local level.

Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), said the Black Lives Matter movement “has touched museums very deeply” because they are “at the intersection of a certain amount of colonialist thinking”. Since the 19th century, Western art collections have reinforced “the Eurocentric point of view of the colonisers”, he noted, but a new generation of curators are calling “not to rethink the museum but tear it down and build it again”.

Govan is quite literally reconstructing Lacma, having demolished 30,000 sq. m of existing galleries to make way for a $750m building project by Peter Zumthor. The redesign will create multiple new narratives for the collection rather than replicating the traditional categories of geography or chronology, he said, describing a more “inclusive” kind of curating. “We have these artefacts and they tell many stories, not just one story. People want to think of museums as somehow objective but they’re not objective at all.”

Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, pointed out that the cost of shipping and insuring art is a barrier to non-profit institutions sharing their collections internationally. Govan advocated instead for more local collaborations. “It is inexpensive and very effective to create collection sharing with university museums” in the same region, he said. Lacma is using such a network as “a laboratory for different thinking”.

Souraya Noujaim, the scientific, curatorial and collections management director at Louvre Abu Dhabi, said that the museum is going down the same path, sharing its collection “with our colleagues from the Emirates and the region”. After all, she said, “we don’t own the objects or the history, we just tell part of the story as we see it today”. 

Museums need new business models that are less dependent on visitor numbers

Covid-19 lockdowns have posed a fundamental threat to the revenues of museums, which depend on real-life visitors. The financial strain seems likely continue into the near future as international tourists stay away. The roundtable talk Modelling the Future: New Business Models for Museums asked how non-profit institutions can ensure their viability in the long term.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has calculated its revenue loss for this year and next at “around $150m”, said the director Max Hollein. The sector worldwide is downsizing in the wake of the pandemic, noted Peter Keller, the director general of the International Council of Museums, citing its online surveys of 49,000 members in 140 countries. A major challenge is to establish “hybrid business models that will enable the development of a sustainable cultural scene”, said Saood Al Hosani, the acting undersecretary of Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism.

“The three pillars—events, sponsorship and ticketing—are not enough,” according to the French tech entrepreneur Frédéric Jousset, a patron of the Louvre, which he says is losing €10m in revenue every month due to the 80% drop in visitors. “The focus on the visitor as the main source of income is a very dangerous one,” agreed Hollein. “It’s much more important to be connected to local audiences, but you [should] also amplify the role you play locally and also internationally as a provider of service, as a provider of experiences and education.”

Jousset suggested that museums could step up their digital initiatives as a source of revenue, rivalling digital art centres such as the Atelier des Lumières in Paris. They could capitalise on their brand and expertise through licensing deals with corporations and the sale of consulting services, he said. There is also potential, he believes, to introduce different tiers of admission fees, just as airlines offer business class for a more luxurious experience. “Pricing models will get more refined, especially though online ticketing,” Hollein said.

Equitable and inclusive institutions must empower their audiences

Several talks raised the issue of diversity and inclusion in museums, which has been the focus of heightened scrutiny in 2020 following global anti-racism protests.

The field has traditionally valued curatorial and scholarly expertise, said Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, speaking in the roundtable discussion Voices of Authority: Expertise, Participation and Inclusion in the Museum of Tomorrow. “We need to recognise the intelligence and dignity of the people we serve,” she said, defending the gallery’s controversial decision to postpone a major Philip Guston exhibition by two years to “take time to listen to our community”. The delay was announced in response to concerns that Guston’s images of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures—intended as a critique of racism—could cause offence. Feldman argued that the works needed to be reinterpreted by the addition of an African-American curator to the project (the show’s four curators are all white).

“We know about Guston’s great intentions, but we can’t disown the fact that 21st-century Americans, particularly African Americans, have their own point of view and reception to the work,” she said at the symposium.

In a keynote speech, the chief executive and director of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, outlined her vision for a democratic institution that will “rise above class-based distinctions between high and low [culture]” and ultimately “empower audiences” to form their own opinions of, and connections between, the exhibits. “We don’t believe we are just purveyors of knowledge,” she said. “The value lies in discourse and dialogue.”

Jackson-Dumont, the former chair of education at New York’s Met, asks: “Is there a way we can treat work on equity and engagement with the public in same way we treat rigorous approaches to art history?”

Equally, participants in the final panel discussion, The Future of Curators, spoke of the transition towards a culture of curating focused on serving communities rather than the stewardship of collections per se. The public is demanding “parity in representation and storytelling” and greater engagement from museums in “civic discourses”, said Reem Fadda, the director of the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation. “The curator has a main role to be that arbiter, to think within the larger public space.”

It is exciting to see the increasing collaboration between curatorial and education departments, said Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. “The role [of a curator] has so significantly shifted, we need to look for different qualities, skills, backgrounds,” beyond art-historical knowledge, she suggested.

Art history can be “an important tool to reform the canon”, said Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Training to be a curator means “equalising the work of speaking to connoisseurs with interpreting to the public—not seeing one as the work of education”.

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Reposted from Campus Security Magazine

As colleges across the country continue to face the many challenges brought on by the pandemic, some campuses have been successful in containing the virus.

While media has mostly covered colleges and universities with significant outbreaks, an analysis by National Geographic found 1,215 U.S. colleges have fewer than 100 reported cases as of Oct. 22. Additionally, 321 campuses have 100 to 1,000 reported cases, 52 have more than 1,000 and 74 have no reported cases.

One common factor between many of the campuses that have reported a similar number of cases is enrollment size. For example, Clemson University, which typically has an enrollment of more than 23,000 students, has the highest reported number of coronavirus cases at 4,082. Similarly, the University of Alabama, which has an enrollment of approximately 39,000, has 3,465 reported cases.

In contrast, Loyola Marymount University has an enrollment of around 9,300 students and only one reported. Sarah Lawrence College, which has an enrollment of around 1,400 students, has only reported three cases so far.

According to National Geographic, the majority of colleges that have been able to contain the virus have created their own public health infrastructures, sharing cohesive public health messaging with constituents and implementing rigid COVID-19 testing.

When students returned to Sarah Lawrence in the fall, they were met with signs throughout campus reminding them to wear masks and circles painted on lawns to indicate proper social distancing. Only 35% of the undergraduate student body is living on campus this year, most of whom as freshmen, compared to 84% last year. Students were required to provide negative COVID test results within two weeks of arrival and have since undergone consistent testing throughout the semester.

Due to the significantly lower number of students living on campuses, each dorm only houses one student instead of the typical double or triple occupancy, and several dorm rooms have been kept empty for students needing to quarantine. Pedestrian traffic flow has been adjusted, as have entrances and exits for all buildings. All buildings are also kept locked so only those with key cards can enter.

Sarah Lawrence President Cristle Collins Judd doesn’t attribute the school’s success to students following guidelines but to its sense of camaraderie.

“A key part for us was active communication with our students about caring for each other as a community,” she said.

Student Ava McDonald, who is a resident advisor, said she helps her residents follow protocols while ensuring they don’t feel isolated from the rest of the campus.

“The activities council does an event almost every day either in person or online,” she said. “I would end my night by going to the open mic, for example, where a bunch of students just get on a Zoom call, and everyone performs whatever they want to share.”

Colleges’ Surrounding Communities Plays Significant Role

According to health experts, in addition to size, the inability for college campuses to regulate transmission in the communities that surround them plays a significant role in keeping the virus off campus. Often, larger campuses are public and are located in or near populous urban areas. Of the colleges that have been able to largely prevent an outbreak, “many of those places have had the advantage of being relatively isolated,” said Sarah Fortune, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Fortune specified that isolation doesn’t necessarily mean a school in a rural area but rather how freely people from the community are allowed to move on campus. Schools in “porous” communities, where there is more movement between the campus and the surrounding area, have seen more outbreaks.

“The places that are more porous, where there is definitely transmission into the campuses from the outside community, these are the places that have to attend much more behavioral risk mitigation strategies,” Fortune said.

If a college is less porous and has a solid testing program in place, she continued, then the student body could, in theory, be more relaxed.

Fortune further emphasized schools that have successfully curbed the virus “have a whole public health infrastructure. You just cannot believe the commitments that they have made to public health and the health of their communities.”

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Reposted from AAM 

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaping holes in the systems that should shield communities from harm. Patching the frayed social safety net will require government, private, and non-profit sectors to work together, going beyond their usual remits to do whatever needs to be done. Museums can play a significant role in this joint effort to protecting vulnerable populations. Today’s guest post offers a case in point, as Jess Turtle, co-founder of the Museum of Homelessness in the UK, tells us how she and her colleagues are rising to this challenge.
–Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums

In March 2020, as museums closed their doors and the streets of London emptied, we had a desperate situation on the streets. My community members and I at Museum of Homelessness immediately began to take action to protect our street homeless and vulnerably housed population. It was far from clear what form those actions should take. For example, we introduced temperature screening at our regular weekly solidarity drop in run with our partners Streets Kitchen but quickly realised that if one of our community members was to present with symptoms, there was no way they could self-isolate. Faced with silence from the authorities, we had to create our own guidance in order to save lives.

It was in this climate that we repurposed all our activity and resources to campaign for government assistance and to provide direct support to our community. Two weeks before the UK government informed local authorities that they needed to bring everyone inside, we and our partners Streets Kitchen published a plan to utilise empty hotel accommodation for people who were street homeless. This was subsequently adopted as national strategy. We wrote to the Secretary of State to ask that the closed Mildmay Hospital in London be brought back into use for COVID care for homeless people. The hospital now provides that specialist care for our community.

Since Museum of Homelessness was founded in 2015, our work has brought us into contact with London homelessness health teams, the Government’s Rough Sleepers initiative, local partners in Islington and grassroots groups across the UK. Drawing on those grassroots connections, we co-created the COVID-19 Homeless Taskforce, teaming up with our long term partners Streets Kitchen, the Outside Project, Simon Community, Union Chapel and joined byGreenpeace, 2 local mutual aid groups, and many others. With our normal cultural activities placed firmly on the back-burner, we borrowed a vacant community centre from the council to launch a 7-day-a-week pandemic response operation. We even re-purposed our museum shelving to store dried goods and cans.

All of this happened in just three short weeks.

Over the course of the summer, over 50 taskforce volunteers pitched in. Together, we dispatched almost 9,000 meals to people in temporary accommodation and on the streets. We were present on the streets every single day. Our mission was simple: To ensure that no one in our community had to face the pandemic alone.

In July, as lockdown eased, the council asked for their borrowed community centre back. But the pandemic is far from over and we face what may be the the worst winter on record for homelessness. It is imperative that our work continues. We are seeking the museum’s “forever home,” but in the meantime, lacking a building, we have set up on the streets. Every Thursday between 12 and 2pm people can visit our StreetMuseum to engage with our collections and spend some safely distanced and well-ventilated time together. We also share hot meals from this site across the borough with people who are living or working at street level.

Some people may question why a museum is carrying out frontline work or campaigning on policy issues. To us, it is simply common sense. Museum of Homelessness is run by people who either are or have been homeless, and has the interests of people who are homeless at its heart. When the biggest crisis of a generation hit our shores, how can we not use every ounce of energy to take care of each other?

Some museums currently face their own crisis—the painful re-evaluation of their histories and identities as 19^th century colonial institutions. As a new museum, Museum of Homelessness is lucky has the opportunity to make a museum for the new century unburdened by history. So far it seems to us that a 21^st century museum is sometimes an exhibition, sometimes an emergency aid hub, sometimes a law clinic, sometimes a bloc in a march. There are key qualities that you will often find in people who are homelessness – resourcefulness, adaptability, creativity. These are qualities that we find in our museum as well, no doubt instilled in it from our community members and they are qualities that help us all survive.

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Reposted from The Guardian

I am a pan-African activist, campaigning for reparations for the crimes against African people committed during colonialism. Recently, I have taken matters into my own hands: I go to museums that exhibit African artefacts; I tell the truth about how these items were looted and stolen from – and then I take them.

I have been deeply political for as long as I can remember. I was born in 1978 in Kinshasa, the capital of what was then Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My father was a revolutionary, and led the 1968 coup d’état that overthrew the Congolese government. When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories of Patrice Lumumba, the father of Congolese independence.

I was 13 when I joined a political party: the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS). After finishing high school, I started teaching myself more about international relations, law and African history. I wanted to explore the bonds that unite all African people. I am now the leader of a pan-African activist group, Unité, Dignité, Courage, an organisation that fights for the liberation and transformation of Africa. We believe the wealth amassed by western nations through our works of art must be returned, and the goods given back to the African people.

On 12 June, I started to put these plans into practice. I travelled to the Quai Branly museum in Paris with a few other activists. A recent report commissioned by Emmanuel Macron found that France has ; more than two-thirds are at the Quai Branly. I took a 19th-century Bari funerary post; when a king died, the post would be placed in front of the grave. It was the only piece that was within our reach; it didn’t weigh much, so was easy to take.

With the post in my hands, I started speaking in the museum – and on a Facebook livestream – explaining how these objects were taken. A crowd gathered. The police arrived, but didn’t know what to do, so they listened to us. After half an hour, we were handcuffed and taken into custody. Security took back the post, and charges were pressed for attempted theft of a registered artwork.

After that, I was on a roll: I took a sword from the MAAOA museum in Marseille, and a Congolese religious statue from the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal in the Netherlands, in September. In each case we were stopped by police, and the items were returned. In October, I went to the Louvre to take a 19th-century Ana Deo swimming sculpture from Indonesia. I was arrested and detained in prison for three days.

After our action at the Quai Branly, I and four others stood trial for attempted theft on 30 September. Our lawyers said that we are not thieves, but activists fighting for political causes. The case became a big story in the French press, encapsulating the national debate about what should be done with the spoils of colonialism.

The charges had a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a €150,000 fine; I was fined €1,000 for aggravated theft. The judge recognised the activist nature of my action, but said he wanted to discourage such stunts. I will appeal against the fine, because I don’t think it is for me to pay this: it is for the Quai Branly and the French state.

At the time of writing, I am awaiting trial for our other three actions, on charges of attempted theft –in Marseille, the Netherlands, and Paris for the act at the Louvre. But, whatever the country, I will continue. 

These artefacts belong to me, because I am African and Congolese. But also because I am a descendant of Ntumba Mvemba, one of the royal families that founded the Kingdom of Kongo in 1390. I am the great-grandson of the governor of Mpangu, second-in-command to the throne and a leader of one of the 12 provinces of the Kingdom of Kongo.

People have to understand that if someone stole their heritage they would react as I am now. Many of my ancestors died protecting these items: they were beheaded. They refused to accept that these objects be taken, and they were killed. Their pain is inside me. 

As told to Alexander Durie.

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Reposted from Security Magazine

The 2020 Global Terrorism Index (GTI) has found that deaths from terrorism fell for the fifth consecutive year since peaking in 2014. The number of deaths has now decreased by 59% since 2014 to 13,826. Conflict remains the primary driver of terrorism, with over 96% of deaths from terrorism in 2019 occurring in countries already in conflict.

The annual Global Terrorism Index, now in its eighth year, is developed by leading think tank the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP) and provides the most comprehensive resource on global terrorism trends.

The largest decreases in deaths occurred in Afghanistan and Nigeria, however they are still the only two countries to have experienced more than 1,000 deaths from terrorism. The fall in deaths was also reflected in country scores, with 103 improving compared to 35 that deteriorated. This is the highest number of countries to record a year-on-year improvement since the inception of the index.

Despite the overall fall in the global impact of terrorism, it remains a significant and serious threat in many countries. There were 63 countries in 2019 that recorded at least one death from a terrorist attack, and the largest increase in terrorism occurred in Burkina Faso – where deaths rose by 590 per cent. Other countries to deteriorate substantially are Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Mali and Niger.

Some of the other key findings:

• The ten countries with the highest impact from terrorism are: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, India, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Philippines
• For the second year in a row South Asia is the region most impacted by terrorism, while Central America and the Caribbean region recorded the lowest impact
• MENA recorded the largest regional improvement in terrorism for the second consecutive year, recording the lowest number of deaths since 2003

Steve Killelea, Executive Chairman of IEP: "As we enter a new decade we are seeing new threats of terrorism emerge. The rise of the far-right in the West and the deteriorations in the Sahel are prime examples. Additionally, as seen in the recent attacks in France and Austria, many smaller groups sympathetic to ISIL philosophies are still active. To break these influences three major initiatives are needed – to break their media coverage and online social networks, disrupt their funding and lessen the number of [sympathizers]."

The GTI uses a number of factors to calculate its score, including the number of incidences, fatalities, injuries and property damage. The Taliban remained the world's deadliest terrorist group in 2019; however, terrorist deaths attributed to the group declined by 18%. ISIL's strength and influence also continued to decline, for the first time since the group became active it was responsible for less than a thousand deaths in any one year. 

Despite the decrease in activity from ISIL in the Middle East and North Africa, ISIL's affiliate groups remain active across the world, with 27 countries recording an attack by ISIL or its affiliates. Sub-Saharan Africa has been hit the hardest, with seven of the ten countries with the largest increases in terrorism deaths residing in the region. ISIL affiliates are mainly responsible for the increase with 41% of all ISIL related deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa.

For North America, Western Europe, and Oceania, the threat of far-right political terrorism has been rising over the past five years. In these regions far-right incidents increased by 250 per cent between 2014 and 2019. There were 89 deaths attributed to far-right terrorists in 2019. Over the past decade measures of societal resilience have been falling in many of the economically advanced economies. This trend is likely to continue because of the extended economic downturn caused by COVID-19, which is likely to increase political instability and violence. 

Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020, preliminary data suggests a decline in both incidents and deaths from terrorism in most regions in the world. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to present new and distinct counter-terrorism challenges. It is important that counter-terrorism initiatives are not curtailed because of decreases in government expenditure due to the economic downturn. Reductions in international assistance for counter-terrorism operations in MENA and sub-Saharan Africa could prove to be counter-productive.

Thomas Morgan, Senior Research Fellow at IEP, explains the findings: "Between 2011 and 2019, riots and violent demonstrations in the West increased by 277 per cent. There are serious concerns that the deteriorating economic conditions will lead to more people becoming alienated and susceptible to extremist propaganda."

The fall in terrorism has also been accompanied by a reduction in the global economic impact of terrorism, decreasing by 25% to US$16.4 billion in 2019. Compared to other forms of violence such as homicide, armed conflict, and military expenditure, terrorism is a small percentage of the total global cost of violence, which was equal to US$14.5 trillion in 2019. However, the true economic impact of terrorism is much higher as these figures do not account for the indirect impact on business, investment, and the costs associated with security agencies in countering terrorism.

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Reposted from The Verge

Shortly after midnight on March 18th, 1990, security guard Rick Abath allowed two men dressed as police officers to enter the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. This decision may have been “the most costly mistake in art history,” according to The Boston Globe. The men stole 13 artworks worth more than $500 million and left Abath handcuffed in the basement.

The mystery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist has never been solved. Today, the pilfered works are part of the National Stolen Art File, a database of looted treasures curated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The 23 agents in charge of this effort are part of the FBI’s art crime team. Created in 2004, the team’s mandate is to track down and return stolen art. Its origins date back to the US invasion of Iraq when 15,000 artifacts were looted from the National Museum in Baghdad. 

Special Agent Tim Carpenter, who heads up the art crime team’s efforts, says, to him, arresting the bad guys is secondary. “Our primary focus is the safe recovery of the artwork,” he explains. If criminals know the FBI is closing in, they might try to destroy the evidence, which in his case can mean works of art. “That’s happened,” he says. “They’re afraid or they’re about to get caught, and they’ll destroy the evidence, and they burn a $10 million original painting. Obviously, that’s a nightmare scenario.”

Carpenter spoke to The Verge about how terrorist organizations use stolen art to fund their criminal enterprises, and why museum heists are still a problem in the United States, despite major advancements in museum security. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Your team was established in 2004. Can you tell me a bit about the idea behind it and why it felt necessary to build a group with specific expertise in tracking down stolen art?

It started officially in 2004, but I don’t want to suggest that the FBI didn’t work art cases prior to that. We’ve had folks working these cases since the ‘70s. And frankly, the ‘70s and ‘80s were the Wild West with art heists in the United States. 

What happened in 2003 is we were occupying Iraq. Everybody knows full well the looting that occurred at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. When that happened, the FBI was tapped on the shoulder, along with a number of other federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and Homeland Security. Basically, Congress said, “What are you guys going to do about this? We have this massive looting problem at this museum.” I think that was a seminal moment where everybody looked at each other and said, “Well, what are we going to do about this? We have some background in this and we have some expertise, but it’s these random associations of agents.” We didn’t really have a team that was capable of deploying on short notice to go and manage a massive event like this. That was the catalyst. 

When we think about what falls under your team’s purview, just based on the National Stolen Art File, it seems like “art” encompasses jewelry, paintings, even furniture. Can you describe the scope of what your team defines as art?

Let me carve it up into two different things. First off, the types of material. What do we define as cultural property? It pretty much could be anything, right? It’s fine art, it’s sculptures, it’s antiquities, books, manuscripts, rock and roll memorabilia, sports memorabilia. You probably saw the news: we got back the ruby slippers from Wizard of Oz. 

Then I’ll shift gears and break it down into the types of crimes that we look at. Our bread and butter, what we’re well-known for, are theft cases. Museum heists, stuff from galleries, stuff from private collectors, and so forth. But truthfully, that represents a relatively small portion of our portfolio. A much larger part of our portfolio these days is related to fraud. We spend a lot of time and resources investigating fraud cases that involve fakes and forgeries. And that’s across the entire gamut of all of those materials that I just described. It’s not just the fake paintings, a fake Picasso or a fake Van Gogh. We see fraud involving forgeries and fakes across every corner of the market. Whether it’s Near East antiquities or coins or manuscripts or sports memorabilia, the market is rife with fraud.

We do a fair number of antiquities trafficking cases — particularly since 2013, when ISIS started occupying territory and destroying world heritage sites and digging up archeological sites and trafficking in that material to support their operations. 

These days, our focus is more on money laundering. Using the art market to launder illegal proceeds is our number one priority at the moment.

It’s interesting that terrorist groups are able to use stolen antiques as a major funding source. It seems like those items would be difficult to launder.

Well, it’s not easy to move that material into the marketplace. We have a lot of rules and regulations, we have import restrictions. The world is paying attention, right? And particularly the material that comes out of Syria or Iraq, that stuff is extremely difficult to move and nigh impossible to move in the open market. But we do see the stuff entering into the gray markets and the black markets. 

It’s an unfortunate truth that there are dealers and collectors across the world that aren’t necessarily concerned about the sourcing of the material. Maybe they just don’t ask questions they should ask. 

Can you share a bit about how you go about investigating these crimes? How do you start to understand where a piece of art came from and then return it to its rightful owner? 

These are criminal investigations. They involve art and cultural property. But at the end of the day, it’s a criminal case, and we’re going to work it just like any traditional case. How we approach a crime, though, largely depends on what the crime is. We’re going to respond to a theft case differently than we would a fraud case.

Pick your favorite museum anywhere in the country, and say they had a heist today, and somebody stole a $30 million painting. That’s a traditional criminal case, right? I don’t want to say it’s run of the mill, but it’s a traditional case. We’re going to do the crime scene, we’re going to collect the evidence, we’re going to interview witnesses, we’re going to do all of those things that you would expect criminal investigators to do. It’s a simple whodunit. 

I will tell you this, particularly about theft cases: what makes them a little bit different than a traditional criminal case is what we’re trying to recover. In some instances, we might be recovering an original Modigliani or an original da Vinci piece or a Rodin or whatever it might be. So for us, and I know a lot of my law enforcement colleagues cringe when I say this, but for us, in the art theft program, arresting the bad guys is really secondary. Our first and primary focus is the safe recovery of the artwork.

Maybe we really want to go after a certain target and make sure that we can arrest them and get them prosecuted properly, but then that exposes the artwork to risk because they burn the art. That’s happened. They’re afraid or they’re about to get caught, and they’ll destroy the evidence, and they burn a $10 million original painting.

Obviously, that’s a nightmare scenario. So you have to treat them a little bit differently than we might do a traditional criminal case. Not to say that we treat them with kid gloves, but we just have a different objective. Our primary objective is the safe recovery of the artwork.

Now, fraud cases, they’re different. Those tend to be more of a paper case. We’re doing subpoenas and search warrants, and we’re getting email records and phone records. You have to just follow the trail. And those tend to be long. They can take a long time.

Do you have set academics who you work with for specific types of cases, or are you constantly having to seek out new experts?

It’s both. Obviously, we have a fairly deep Rolodex that we use. And then there’s always new stuff that’s going to come up like, “Oh, we haven’t seen this before. We’ve got to go around.” 

I get this a lot, where people make this assumption because I’m the manager of the FBI’s art theft program that I’m some kind of a scholar or an academic. Listen, let me dispel that notion. I don’t have a PhD in art history. I’m not an archeologist. We’re criminal investigators. My expertise is in the investigation of art and culture property. It doesn’t make me an art expert. 

When I lecture and I go out and I give these presentations, I’m always quick to point out to everybody, “Listen, I’m not an expert in any of these fields. I’m an expert at finding experts.” This is what I do for a living: I find experts to come in and help us work our cases. 

We do have expertise on the team. And of course, you pick up stuff along the way. You can’t do these cases and not learn along the way.

How big of an issue is art crime in the United States? I’d imagine we’re a large market for stolen art, even if theft isn’t as big of an issue anymore, compared to other parts of the world.

The United States is the largest consumer market in the world for cultural property, and that’s licit and illicit. We’re a wealthy nation. We have a lot of money in the United States. And where there’s money, people collect, and they’re going to buy culture property. 

There’s certainly laundering going on in the market. There’s money laundering where people are laundering illicit proceeds. Maybe it’s drug money or whatever it might be. And they’re cleaning that money through purchases in the art market, which is largely unregulated. 

We also have provenance laundering, particularly for antiquities and so forth. They come out of the ground and are undocumented. You have to create a provenance in order to be able to sell them in the market.

I don’t know if I’d say that we have less art crime than the rest of the world. I think we probably have more here in the United States. It’s just that we don’t suffer those Hollywood-style museum heists — that tends to be a Europe problem. We had that problem in the ’80s. Museum security has improved drastically over the years, so we see less of that now.

We still have a fair amount of museum thefts in the United States, but they tend to be internal. About 80 percent of all museum thefts in the United States are internal thefts, out of the storage facilities instead of off the gallery floor.

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Reposted from The New York Times

The German police said on Tuesday that they had arrested three men with links to organized crime and were searching for two other suspects in connection with the theft of gold, diamonds and other precious stones from three highly prized collections of Baroque royal jewels in a museum in Dresden last year.

Hundreds of officers and special forces from across the country descended on a Berlin neighborhood before dawn, searching 20 apartments, two garages, a cafe and several vehicles, the authorities in Dresden, an eastern German city, said.

“The stolen art treasures have not yet been found,” the Dresden police and prosecutors said in a joint statement, adding that numerous storage media, clothing and small amounts of narcotics had been recovered.

The predawn break-in last Nov. 25 at the Jewel Room, one of 10 rooms in the Royal Palace museum known as the Grünes Gewölbe, or Green Vault, made headlines around the world because of the importance of the stolen pieces and the circumstances surrounding the crime.

The pieces were said to have “immeasurable” cultural and historical value and the theft raised questions about security in German museums after another spectacular break-in at a Berlin museum two years earlier.

In the Dresden heist, the thieves used an ax to break the security glass of the cases holding the jewels and stole 11 pieces, including three treasures dating to the 18th-century nobleman August the Strong, prince-elector of Saxony and little-loved ruler of Lithuania and Poland. Among the trove were sets known as the “Diamond Rose” and “Queens’ Jewelry,” along with parts of two other collections and several individual items.

Dresden officials identified the three men arrested on Tuesday only as German citizens, two age 23 and one age 26. Thomas Geithner, a spokesman for the Dresden police, said the men were “at home in the Berlin clan milieu,” a reference to organized crime rings in the German capital that the authorities there define as being made up of members who are related to one another, or at least have a common ethnic origin.

A judge ordered that the three suspects remain in custody pending the outcome of an investigation on suspicion of gang theft and arson. The three men made no statements regarding the potential charges.

In February, Wissam Remmo, 23, and Ahmed Remmo, 21, two members of a family with known links to a Berlin crime ring, were each sentenced to four and a half years in a youth prison for stealing a 220-pound Canadian gold coin from the Bode Museum in Berlin in 2017. The two men, who are cousins, were also ordered to pay nearly $4 million, the value of the giant coin, which was never recovered and is believed to have been melted down and sold.

The police and prosecutors in Dresden said on Tuesday that they were searching for two other suspects in the Green Vault heist, Abdul Majed Remmo and Mohamed Remmo, both 21, issuing warrants with their pictures and asking for tips from the public.

Jürgen Schmidt, prosecutor in Dresden, said that investigators had relied on footage from security cameras at the entrance and inside the museum, as well as using “advanced technology,” to link the suspects detained in Berlin to the Royal Palace museum and to one of two getaway cars used in the heist.

The top security official in Berlin, Andreas Geisel, the city-state’s interior minister, said that officers in the capital had worked closely with their colleagues in Dresden, adding that the arrests were a warning to the criminal clans.

“This is another signal to the scene,” Mr. Geisel said in a statement. “Nobody should believe that they can ignore this state and its rules. ”

The objects in the Green Vault belong to a collection of Baroque jewels that have survived together largely unscathed from the 18th century. The Royal Palace building was heavily damaged during World War II, but it was painstakingly rebuilt after German reunification and reopened to the public in 2006. The rooms hold a collection of about 3,000 individual objects.

The stolen jewels were not insured and museum officials would not give a figure for their value, insisting that their worth lay in their historical and cultural significance as part of a complete royal collection.

Because they are unique, the pieces would be extremely difficult to hawk on the open market, leading to fears that they could be broken down, with the gems re-cut and the gold melted.

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Reposted from AAM

Almost all US museums closed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. While a few reopened by summer, many decided to remain shuttered for the entire year, and often for these museums the only way to engage with the public has been via digital platforms. While we wait for the pandemic to end, museums must adapt to operating in a time of heightened concern regarding health and sanitation. Digital technologies can help museums enhance safety for staff and visitors, reassure the public, and reach audiences not ready to visit in person. However, digital solutions require time, training, and integration in addition to hard costs. What digital tools can help support museums during hard times to come, and how can museums assess whether and when to adopt these solutions?

This post is designed to help museum staff think through the pros and cons of potential digital strategies that may help museums face three challenges in the peri- and post-pandemic era:

• Staying engaged with the public while they cannot or will not visit in person;
• Managing attendance upon reopening;
• Creating safe interactive experiences in the museum galleries.

For each challenge, I provide an overview, review some potential digital solutions, and offer a set of considerations for evaluating the ROI of implementing these solutions. I hope you use this as a resource to fuel your conversations and inform decisions about the strategic use of digital in the coming year.

Staying Engaged with the Public

In June 2020, during the first wave of closures, most museums reported using some form of digital engagement to serve the public. (According the AAM’s June COVID Snapshot, three-quarters provided educational resources for children, parents, and teachers; more than half provided resources for college students and adults; sixty percent offered livestream or prerecorded lectures, and sixty-four percent offered other types of digital entertainment or activities.) Some of these efforts received considerable press, and a few museums increased their followers on social media by orders of magnitude when their content went viral. But it is difficult to measure the overall success of these efforts because, in many cases, museums leapt into digital content production without clear expectations for the outcome. To set useful goals around public engagement, museums need to identify what the public wants in terms of digital content, what they actually use, and what the museum gets in return.

Some Digital Solutions

• Sharing content or activities via social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
• Offering online activities (games, escape rooms, downloadable projects)
• Creating digital content (videos, portals to collections or exhibits)
• Organizing virtual events (galas, happy hours)

Considerations for evaluating ROI

Who is the museum trying to reach? For example,

• Members
• Visitors
• Specific target audiences such as parents, school children, older individuals experiencing social isolation
• General public

To what end? For example:

• Prime people to visit when the museum reopens.
• Help groups face specific challenges (e.g., parents in need of tools to entertain children, students in need of learning resources, isolated individuals in need of social connection).
• Cultivate gratitude/appreciation for the museum’s work (which may translate, long-term, into support).
• Grow new audiences (that may remain digital).
• Develop services the museum may want to continue post-pandemic (e.g., online courses, virtual recreations of exhibits, an online store).

How does a given solution connect to the museum’s business plan? For example, will it:

• Demonstrate the museum’s value to potential funders (government entities; philanthropic foundations).
• Inspire members to maintain their membership.
• Create connections that can be mined during fundraising (e.g., #GivingTuesday on Twitter; crowdfunding projects; participation in virtual fundraising events).
• Build income streams through advertising, fees, or opportunities to donate.

This last point is particularly critical. With revenue from attendance, events, and onsite sales on pause, many are asking whether museums can monetize digital income to fill the gap. The short answer is yes, but it isn’t easy. While there is robust demand for digital content, there is also ample competition, and users expect high-quality, engaging products to make it worth the cost. Advertising revenue is tied to reach, which takes time and strategy to build.

Lastly, what are the solution’s vulnerabilities?

• Does it depend on a free commercial platform outside your control? (Communications strategies and ad income build around Facebook, YouTube, etc., for example, are at the mercy of policy changes or continued functionality of the platform.)
• Will the museum be able to afford to pay for fixes, improvements, upgrades, especially if the solution was initially affordable due to grant funding, or donated expertise?

Managing Attendance

States and cities typically established regulations for staged reopening that included attendance limitations for indoor venues. For museums, attendance in initially stages has typically been capped at twenty-five to fifty percent capacity. Even in states and cities with no regulatory limits, many museums choose to enforce voluntary limitations, particularly if their indoor spaces are small, or configured in such a way that is was not possible to impose one-way flow of visitors through the galleries. Colleen Dilenschneider, of IMPACTS Research, found that by July of 2020, twenty-six percent of the public identified limited attendance as a factor that would make them feel safe and comfortable visiting museums again, while “avoiding long lines” clocked in at twenty-four percent.

Some Digital Solutions

Several kinds of online booking systems enable the museum to offer reservations, free passes or ticketing, tied to timed entry. These include:

• Third party booking platforms. These companies typically charge a fee for each sale, but some, such as Eventbrite, do not charge users for free “events.”
• Modules offered as part of existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Point of Sale (POS) systems. This can be an affordable option for museums already using CRM or POS systems, with the additional benefit that information gathered during the ticketing process can be added directly to the museum’s database on performance and customer history.
• Systems designed to support dynamic pricing. A growing number of museums (notably zoos) have adopted so-called “buy-ahead” pricing which sets advance ticket prices using data on attendance, weather, travel bookings, school schedules and other relevant sources to project demand. This allows the museum to steer visitors towards underused times, maximize the profit from premium times, and ensure that affordable options are available as well.

Considerations for evaluating ROI

• How will online ticketing affect the process of welcoming people into the museum? Digital tickets can increase safety by helping maintain physical distancing. Moving sales and ticketing online may also reduce the number of staff needed to manage admissions at the door.
• What data will the system collect? Contact and demographic information can be used for marketing as well as for tracking attendance trends. This information can be critical to improving targeted communications and business decisions about staffing and marketing. During the pandemic, it can also facilitate contact tracing.
• How will this data interface with other museum data? Tracking the behavior of individual visitors/members (with due attention to privacy) can support sophisticated personalization of services and communication.
• In the case of both points above, how will the data actually be used? Data is only valuable when it is used to inform decisions. To realize this value, the museum has to ensure staff are working across departments to use data from ticketing to shape marketing and communications plans, set prices, and make decisions about staffing, hours, etc. The software systems mentioned above (CRM, POS, dynamic pricing) can automate data analysis, but still require decision makers to make use of the results.
• What is the projected effect of the ticketing system on revenue? Online ticketing can make it easier for the museum to experiment with extended hours, or special (fee-based) exclusive access for families or small groups. Time-based pricing can increase per capita profits from ticketing.
• What is the potential impact on accessibility and equity? Requiring online reservations or ticketing is one more barrier to people without reliable access to digital connectivity. The museum many need to find ways to accommodate walk-in visitors without making them feel excluded or out-of-the-loop.

Touchless tech

Early in the pandemic, much of the messaging around disease prevention focused on disinfecting surfaces, hand washing, and use of hand sanitizer. Despite growing consensus that fomites (objects carrying the virus) are relatively minor risk for COVID transmission, public expectations regarding surface cleaning remain high. A large majority of museums have increased or plan to increase the frequency of cleaning upon reopening, and many have shifted cleaning to visible, daytime hours. But even such performative cleaning may not overcome peoples’ aversion to being in a high-touch environment while the pandemic persists.

During the pandemic, museums may respond to this aversion by shutting down interactive elements that require touch. However, it’s unlikely that the current situation will reverse the decades-long trend of increasing emphasis on interactive experiences in all sorts of museums. Going forward, it may be practical to combine increased cleaning with the implementation of a variety of touchless interactive technologies, ranging from the well-established to the emergent.

Some Digital Solutions

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

One solution to is to co-opt the technology most visitors already bring into the museum—smart phones—which they are confident carry only their own germs. Many museums are removing printed handouts and gallery guides during the pandemic: the text can be made available on the museum’s website or as downloadable PDFs. Museums can also install applications designed allow personal devices to interface with existing touchscreens, kiosks, ATMs and other interactive displays. [Nick—I’m familiar with FreeTouch. Do you know if it has competitors, or is it in anyway unique?] Many museums already use apps, IM interfaces and chatbots to interact with the public via smart phones—the pandemic may accelerate the adoption of these communications channels as well.

Hover Technology

Another touch-free adaptation is to install screens that respond to proximity rather than contact. Such screens have been available since 2012, but the most common systems require a user to position their hand quite close to the screen, and users may mistake these for touch screens, or touch inadvertently when they attempt to trigger the controls. “Deep Hover” technology, currently in development, will let users to control an interface from anywhere from a few inches to a foot or more above the display. (An additional cool feature: by delivering information about the user’s hand position at high speed as “pre-interaction information,” associated software can speed response time by using machine learning and AI to make decisions about a user’s intent before they have completed an action.)

Gesture-based Interactives

Many museums already make effective use of gesture-control interfaces developed for gaming (Wii for Nintendo, Kinect for Xbox). Responsive to whole body motion, these systems can be intuitive, accessible, and require no special device on the part of visitors. They support the creation of social, playful multi-user experiences that allow visitors to interact with digital adaptations of collections items, or with born-digital creations.

Considerations for Evaluating ROI

• For whom is the solution designed, and what are the benefits?
• Are there partners who can help the museum design and maintain appropriate solutions? This might include students or staff at local colleges or universities, maker groups or collaboratives, individual artists or technologists.
• What is the cost to build, install, and maintain the system?
• Is the system bespoke, or off the shelf? Bespoke systems are vulnerable to obsolescence if the original designer, or museum staff, can’t update to keep pace with changes in hardware and software. On the other hand, interactives built around commonly available commercial systems may be left stranded if those systems are discontinued.
• What kind of maintenance will the system require, and how long is it projected to last? Nothing makes for a more frustrating visitor experience than interactive displays that are malfunctioning or out of service. Especially during a time of staff constraints, can the museum ensure that digital interactives are quickly replaced or repaired? What will the museum need to budget, and on what time frame, for the replacement and upgrades?
• Is it intuitive and easy for visitors to find and use? For many years bespoke museum apps were seen as the solution to delivering information and experiences in the gallery, but many potentially great apps foundered on the fact that very few visitors actually download them. (Barriers include: making visitors aware the app exists; providing strong, reliable Wi-Fi to support rapid downloads onsite; making the application easy to learn and use.) Some museums solve this problem by coopting systems that visitors already spend time on (Facebook messenger, text messaging). One of the beauties of gestural control systems (like Kinect) is that they are super intuitive—visitors learn to use them through experimentation, rather than by reading instructions.
• Is it a solution that will be appropriate and desirable, even if/when concerns about surface sanitation ease?
• Does the solution create new challenges to equity and inclusion? BYOD depends on a significant percentage of visitors having the relevant technology. In some cases it may be preferable to offer content, such as audio tracks, that are triggered via proximity rather than pushing to a digital device. Some gesture-based interfaces are not designed to recognize the actions of people using wheelchairs.

I hope these questions help you frame discussions with your colleagues, board, and staff about what technologies might be worth adopting in the next year. Please, share your experiences with evaluating and adopting digital solutions to pandemic challenges with your colleagues via social media, on the AAM discussion board Museum Junction, and in comments on this post. We are all learning together.

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